Robert Mueller, Former F.B.I. Director, Is Named Special Counsel for Russia Investigation

Justifying your support of trump as "lesser of two evils"...

 

There are 312939 lining up to face him because they all see the other Democratic candidates as extremely weak meaning it is a wide open race. That **** show will be a blast to watch as they see who can be the most batcrap crazy socialist.

 

Very cute Trey....... Mueller didn't indict the President because he cannot indict the President. He spent a great amount of time spelling this out, including referring to William Barr's policy that he would not indict a sitting President.

So really, other than attempting to twist what was in Mueller's Report, Trey is not really saying much.

What specifically can he not discuss from the report that was released to the public? Do you have some authority to cite? The Department of Justice does not speak in press conferences and reports? Well, the head of the Department of Justice has already given press conferences, the DOJ has authored a number of reports. Indeed, the website for the DOJ has an entire area that is for press releases, reports and press conferences. So.....

I'm sure the democrats would love to ask Mueller may things, including the alleged conversation between Barr and Mueller. The thing is, the Democrats do not need to ask Mueller that question because he already goes into pain staking detail answering that exact question.

I must admit, I would love to know from Robert Mueller if he told William Barr the exact opposite of what is in his year long, 450 page report. I am SURE that Robert Mueller told William Barr the opposite of what is in his report. Indeed, if that were the case I am sure that William Barr would be falling all over himself to have Robert Mueller testify.

As usual, Ken Starr doesn't really do much other than state the obvious. I agree with him, at this point it is all about Volume II and the concern about obstruction of justice. I think most people know the President acted in an unfitting manner and likely obstructed justice. The real question is whether the democrats want to waste their time trying to prove the President is a crook when the American people in large numbers already know he is a crook. At some point the democrats need to try and offer solutions to the problems of the voters they lost in 2016, and they are not doing that at this time.

 

Do you know when I hear this "lesser of two evils" trotted out? Even 4 years at election time.

You always were a strong Trump supporter, you were always going to favor him based on his policies. At the end of the day you really do not care if he had unprotected sex with a prostitute while his wife recovered from child birth. You do not care that he is a serial liar, and that he has surrounded himself with corrupt people. Why? Because he got you the Supreme Court.

It is going to be a tight election regardless, but lets not act like Trump is some sort of pillar of virtue or wronged man...... even the obstruction of justice referenced in the Mueller report is 100% his own doing.

 

No, you are both wrong. From AG Barr's testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee:

Attorney General William Barr Opening Statement Explaining Release Of Mueller Report

As you know, Volume 2 of his report dealt with obstruction, and the special counsel considered whether certain actions of the president could amount to obstruction. He decided not to reach a conclusion. Instead, the report recounts 10 episodes and discusses potential legal theories for connecting the president's actions to elements of obstruction offenses. Now we first heard that the special counsel's decision not to decide the obstruction issue at meet--at the March 5 meeting when he came over to the department, and we were, frankly, surprised that--that they were not going to reach a decision on obstruction. And we asked them a lot about the reasoning behind this and the basis for this. Special Counsel Mueller stated three times to us in that meeting, in response to our questioning, that he emphatically was not saying that but for the OLC opinion he would have found obstruction. He said that in the future the facts of the case against the president might be such that a special counsel would recommend abandoning the OLC opinion, but this is not such a case. We did not understand exactly why the special counsel was not reaching a decision. And when we pressed him on it, he said that his team was still formulating the explanation.

Once we heard that the special counsel was not reaching a conclusion on obstruction, the deputy and I discussed and agreed that the department had to reach a decision. We had the responsibility to assess the evidence as set forth in the report and to make the judgment. I say this because special counsel was appointed to carry out the investigative and prosecutorial functions of the department and to do it as part of the Department of Justice. The powers he was using, including the power of using the Grand Jury and using compulsory process, exists for that purpose, the function of the Department of Justice in this arena, which is to determine whether or not there has been criminal conduct. It's a binary decision. Is there enough evidence to show a crime, and do we believe a crime has been committed?

We don't conduct criminal investigations just to collect information and put it out to the public. We do so to make a decision. And here we thought there was an additional reason, which is this was a very public investigation, and we had made clear that the results of the investigation were going to be made public, and the deputy and I felt that the evidence developed by the special counsel was not sufficient to establish that the president committed a crime, and therefore it would be irresponsible and unfair for the department to release a report without stating the department's conclusions and thus leave it hanging as to whether the department considered that there had been criminal conduct.

So the deputy attorney general and I conducted a careful review of the report with our staffs and legal advisors, and while we disagreed with some of the legal theories and felt that many of the episodes discussed in the report would not constitute obstruction as a matter of law, we didn't rest our decision on that. We took each of the 10 episodes, and we assessed them against the analytical framework that had been set forth by the special counsel. And we concluded that the evidence developed during the special counsel's investigation was not sufficient to establish that the president committed an obstruction of justice offense.​

 

Hmm... who to believe? barr's testimony? ... even though Mueller in writing accused barr of not being straight with the American public. Or Mueller's report?

 

Wow...

 

That's very nice and all. But, that is the characterization from William Barr about Mueller's reasoning, and it contradicts the statement that Mueller put in the official document. I don't know what really happened in the conversation Barr describes and maybe it happened just as he says. But, even if that were the case, I don't see how you can subordinate the words written in the official report by the Special Counsel to some second-hand summary of a private conversation the dude might have had -- one in which Barr says he didn't understand Mueller's reasoning. And it isn't that Barr's statement gives you a more nuanced understanding of what Mueller had meant in the report; Barr's statement leads you to believe the exact opposite of what the Mueller Report actually says.

You are essentially saying that Mueller's true motivation is that he found no evidence of crimes but that he fabricated a fake (but sound) legal reasoning for not finding crimes. But only for obstruction, not conspiracy. That would be an insane thing to do. Or to believe.

Beyond that, what does it matter if Mueller privately or unofficially believes something else? We're a society that is run with documents. What is in the Report is what matters, not what is in Mueller's or Barr's head. So, if the 'cannot accuse a sitting President' rule is fake reasoning, it still becomes real by its inclusion in the report. That reasoning might be overturned later, but it is still the official finding of the SCO no matter what Barr testifies to.

 

Mueller could have recommended charges for obstruction if he had discovered a solid basis for them, which he apparently did not. Recommending charges was at the core of the purpose of his investigation, in fact. If he was not able to conclude that there was a basis for charges, this whole exercise really was a complete waste of time.

 

Instead he outlined the evidence for obstruction and against...and specifically said he couldn’t exonerate Trump on obstruction...

So Trump couldn’t be exonerated on obstruction....

 

LMFAO I will go with what is in the official report that Robert Mueller wrote and released that specifically spells out why he did not and would not offer an opinion on indicting a sitting President.

Get out of her with this....

 

Robert Mueller in a 450 page report spells all that out in his report.

I would suggest you actually READ the report, especially volume two.

 

Well, let the Democrats try to impeach him then. Keep us posted on that, will you?

 

No, absolutely not. Out of respect for the president's due process rights, it was his legal conclusion that because he could not indict a president, neither could he accuse a president. It does not have anything at all to do with how compelling the evidence is. The Report does not describe any scenario in which he could recommend charges. We only have Barr's vague assertion that he could. The guy Mueller accused in writing of mischaracterizing his report.

Also, he specifically says that recommending charges was not his core purpose. The first sentence of what I quoted you says, "First, a traditional prosecution or declination decision entails a binary determination to initiate or decline a prosecution, but we determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment." And then he goes on to explain what I just explained to you.

As for the waste of time, no again. He laid out the case for impeachment on obstruction. All Congress has to do is take his work and write it into an impeachment document. The only reason Trump is still President today is because Republicans so willfully accept the pathetic fig leaf excuses they're offered to look the other way when their guy commits crimes. So long as Republican voters think winning the partisan fight is more important than justice, the Senate Republicans can likewise look the other way, and even the House Democrats have an excuse to not do the hard thing and bring charges. This is an abject failure of the system of accountability that we thought democracy always brought to bear.

Something has happened in the last 40 years. When it became apparent that Nixon really was guilty, many Republicans turned on him. Now that it is likewise apparent that Trump is guilty, Republicans find rationalizations to convince themselves that he is somehow not guilty even with it staring them in the face. Or, for readers who have already thoroughly brainwashed themselves: somehow so many liberals have convinced themselves of his guilt without a shred of evidence (lol). So what has happened that we as a country could stand for truth and justice 40 years ago, but today one party or the other is living in a complete fairy tale land? Have the power brokers really gotten this good at manipulating the masses?

 

on the letter signed by the former federal prosecutors:

Last week a man opened my front door and walked into the house without asking anyone's permission. He took a wallet from a bowl in the kitchen and drove to a local bank, where he used the driver's license and the bank card contained in the wallet to deposit a check he also found there. Then he came back to the house and took a beer from the refrigerator.

How many crimes did he commit? Trespassing? Robbery? Identify theft? Bank fraud? The answer is zero, because I am in fact the man in question, the owner of the house, the person identified by the license, the holder of the bank account into which the check was deposited, and the legal purchaser of the can of Coors. Funny how much of a difference that makes.

This is why I roll my eyes every time I see another story about the possibility of "indicting" President Trump for obstruction of justice — or any other crime. On Monday afternoon some 400 odd ex-prosecutors and former Justice Department officials released an open letter in which they argued that if the president had been "any other person" he would be indicted for "obstructing" an investigation that was, like all federal law enforcement activity, under his authority.

This is like saying that if I had been anyone other than myself the other day I would have been charged with entering my own domicile without authorization, impersonating myself, and raiding my own fridge. If Trump had been "any other person," he would not have been the president, which means that he would not have been in a position to do and say all the things with which the signers of the open letter find fault.

Indicting a president for an alleged federal crime is not possible. It would mean, in essence, that the president is indicting himself, which is like saying that a general is disobeying his own orders or that a pope is falling into schism with himself. The president, through his numerous deputies, authorizes, conducts, and coordinates all federal law enforcement activity. He and his advisers make prudential decisions about what investigations receive monetary and other resources. Trump could have shuttered Robert Mueller's special investigation before it had even begun.

Even people who insist that real or hypothetical statutes could create some kind of magical law enforcement authority existing outside and above the executive branch — a view rejected by many liberal legal scholars, including Justice Elena Kagan, in the wake of Justice Scalia's famous dissent in Morrison v. Olsen — have nothing to stand on here. The Mueller investigation did not even have a statutory basis — the old Ethics in Government Act of 1978 that established the constitutionally dubious vehicle for such investigations lapsed two decades ago. Instead it proceeded on the basis of Justice Department regulations dreamed up during the Clinton administration. This piece of toilet paper could have been ripped up and ignored at any time, just like any other memorandum or executive order or standing rule that has issued forth from a previous administration. President Obama was acting fully within the scope of his authority when he tossed out Don't Ask, Don't Tell; so was Trump when he threw out DACA. I happen to think that both of these decisions were bad, but that doesn't make them illegal or unconstitutional.

None of this is meant to suggest that a president's authority is truly limitless, much less that he is never be answerable to earthly justice. If a president were to commit a serious common-law offense — a murder, for example — he would almost certainly be impeached in the House of Representatives, removed from office by the Senate, and tried in the relevant state jurisdiction. The same would probably hold true for many federal crimes — though not, it would appear, those related to campaign finance law, which Trump indisputably violated in October 2016. This is the genius of the impeachment mechanism: It resolves the essential tension between presidential authority over federal law enforcement and the culpability of the man in whom that authority is vested by stripping him of the former.

Trump's reasons for complaining about the special counsel investigation and half-heartedly attempting to bring it to a premature conclusion might have been bad. They might have been world-historically evil. They are open to criticism from ordinary Americans, from journalists, and from elected officials, who are free to bring impeachment proceedings against him in the House. But made-up scenarios about what would have happened to him if he were not the president and his Justice Department were made up of people he did not appoint or have authority over are not just pointless. They are embarrassing.
​

https://theweek.com/articles/839908/liberals-favorite-fantasy-trump-indictment

 

B.S.

Mueller had nothing. You guys have been complicit in the biggest politically instigated and mass media promoted lie in American history. Lie and deny away. But the truth is not on your side.

 

Stop being a brainwashed lemming.

The report is clear as day and Mueller will confirm as soon as he testifies.

 

Imagine having the Mueller report readily available to read in front of you and still thinking this was all "manufactured." I guess when it's your guy, it's easy to ignore the obvious bad.

Same goes for the other side when it's their guy though.

 

I guess that's the best you could respond with after your previous posts were shredded for mistakes and miss-truths...